1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, a printing apparatus, a printing system, a printing control method, and a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a printing system includes a printer driver configured to receive a print instruction from an application installed in a client computer and to generate print data for a printing apparatus connected to a network with the client computer. In the printing system, there is an application, which can directly generate drawing data of a printer language of the printing apparatus without causing the printer driver to generate the print data, and send the print data via the printer driver. Hereinafter, the application is referred to as a pass-through application.
One of typical pass-through applications is Acrobat (registered trademark) produced by Adobe Systems Incorporated. The pass-through application such as Acrobat inquires whether the printer driver used for printing supports PostScript (hereinafter, PS) pass-through during printing execution to the printer driver. If the inquired printer driver supports the PS pass-through, the printer driver replies that the printer driver itself supports the PS pass-through to the application that has sent the inquiry.
When the application determines that the printer driver to be used for printing supports the PS pass-through, the application itself generates a PS command when printing, and sends the PS command to the printer designated as a port of the printer driver.
A PS pass-through application inquires whether the printer driver used for printing supports the PS pass-through to the printer driver using the following means. That is, in Windows (registered trademark), the PS pass-through application refers to setting of POSTSCRIPT_PASSTHROUGH of a printer escape function to determine whether the printer driver supports the PS pass-through.
On the other hand, when the printer driver replies that the printer driver does not support the PS pass-through, the PS pass-through application performs the following processing. That is, the PS pass-through application issues a generation command of the print data to the printer driver according to an OS standard drawing method defined on an operating system on the client computer.
A PS printer driver can also intentionally turn off POSTSCRIPT_PASSTHROUGH. In this case, the PS pass-through application issues a print command according to the OS standard drawing method. That is, the PS pass-through application has the same drawing method as that of the printer driver which does not support the PS pass-through (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-292047).
In the system configured to send the drawing data generated by the pass-through application described above, paper sheets to be printed are subjected to double-sided printing with a half of the paper sheet in size and the output paper sheets are bundled to finish the paper sheets into a book state is referred to as bookbinding printing.
A method for performing the bookbinding printing stores the print data output from the printer driver on the printing apparatus side for each page and performs imposition on the printing apparatus side (hereinafter, referred to as device bookbinding). In order to execute the device bookbinding, the total pages are rasterized into bit map data for each page before printing is started to be stored in a memory. After the total pages become clear, arrangement processing and print processing for imposition are to be performed. This disadvantageously requires a time until the printing is started and a time until the printing is ended.
A compact and saved memory type printer disadvantageously cannot store all the data for the total pages in the memory.